To be continued?

But I do want to find time to blog because, truthfully, here in the 'burbs, I feel a constant tension between wanting to focus on those priorities and the societal pressures that push us towards materialism and consumerism. 

My husband has half joked over the years that he wants our family to be a self-contained unit.  I love family time as much as the next person.  But we need to be involved in community and have friends, so we cannot be completely self-contained.

But because of the pushes towards materialism and consumerism, I do wonder periodically if we should be living elsewhere.  But where?

Sometimes I think we should trade our big, modern, HOA-governed house in a well-planned neighborhood for a home in an older, more modest neighborhood.  I have even identified neighborhoods and looked at real estate listings.  But those houses tend to be smaller.  We need a certain amount of space because we homeschool and are in the process of adopting again.  I'd love a smaller home for the upkeep, but it will be a while until we are out of the child-rearing stage and can downsize like that.

Sometimes I think we should move to a rural home and homestead.  But then I remember I am terrified of snakes and scorpions, and I've never even successfully gardened.  Plus all the extra driving would be so time-consuming.  And there are amenities we love about living in part of a large metropolitan area.  We are heavy users of the library system--both participating in activities and checking out books and other media.  And this year, my kids and I have explored the performing arts more.  I found frugal ways to get us to the symphony, opera and ballet.  Very fun!  I don't want to leave those things behind.

And to be honest, I am so tired of moving.  I've moved a fair amount in my life and now I just want to stay put.  I want to bloom where I am planted currently.  I do dream of retiring to a little condo with my hubby some day when we are empty nesters.  But for now, the big house in the 'burbs is the best fit.

So, for better or worse, I foresee being in this house for quite a while.  And I need to ever improve my ability to resist the pressures towards materialism and consumerism.  I'm sure I'm not the only one struggling in that regard!

Keeping Up With the Joneses

A couple years ago at my church, our pastor had a woman in our congregation give a talk about her family's struggles to get their finances under control.  At the time, our community had been hard hit by the Great Recession.  Many were out of work.  So many had lost or were going to lose their homes.  Times were rough.  Our congregation offers Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University, a course on money management.  The talk was intended to encourage others to take the course to get on better footing financially.

I remember when the woman was giving her talk, she shared that her family had spent more than they needed to on a fancy home, nice cars and nice clothes.  The pastor interrupted and asked her why they had spent more than they should have on such things.  Without any need to reflect, the woman said it was a case of "keeping up with the Joneses."  In other words, they had felt social pressure to spend money on things to appear affluent and comfortable. 

I was stunned by this response.  This woman and her family seemed so self-assured.  They were people of great faith.  I was shocked that such people would care what the Joneses--or anyone else thought about them.

But I've thought about it over the years, and am no longer shocked.  It is human nature for us to care what others think about us.  In our culture, we don't like people to think we are poor, suffering economically or not able to afford whatever we want.  We don't want to be pitied.  And we want to fit in. 

Particularly here in the 'burbs, we often have a distorted sense of others' finances.  We often think that others are doing better than they are.  They have nice things, go nice places.  So we figure they must be doing well financially. 

But if the Great Recession has taught my husband and me anything, it was to not believe the facades we were shown.  To recognize facades are not an accurate representation of reality.  When the economy tanked, we were shocked that people had misrepresented being laid off.  We were shocked at all the people in our social circle who lost their homes.  At one point, it seemed like almost everyone we knew was impacted by the economic collapse. 

I like to think that I am mature and secure enough that I don't care what others think about me and my family.  Maybe I don't obsess about it, but I am not immune to it.  And in the 'burbs where everyone is putting up facades and trying to show they are living the good life, it can be awkward and even embarrassing when you choose to live a different way and not spend like everyone else.  And I think that type of awkwardness and embarrassment is why many keep on spending instead of choosing a different lifestyle that might enable them to live a more fulfilling life.

For this reason, I'm starting a new series called "Keeping Up With the Joneses."  The point of posts in this series will be for me to share concrete examples of situations where my family and I have felt social pressures to spend money, and to describe how we have (or have not) overcome such social pressures.  I hope it will be an encouragement.  In our culture, we don't discuss financial problems openly, so it comes as a shock with others admit financial limitations.  This series will be somewhat unique for that reason.

Opportunity Costs

When I was going to apply to law school, I took a couple courses in Economics at a local community college.  I had never taken any as an undergrad, but I read somewhere that everyone who goes to law school should know something about economics.  I found it fascinating and wished in retrospect I'd taken Economics earlier, I even wished I had majored in it. 

One concept I learned in my basic Economics coursework was "opportunity cost."  It is defined differently in different settings but expresses the idea of the value of alternative choices in a given situation.  For example, if I choose to write for this blog, then I forgo spending time with my family, reading a good book, and giving my dogs a bath.  At this period in time, I've valued expressing myself in this blog over those other options.  The opportunity costs of posting to this blog are time with family, reading a book and bathing my dogs.  I've sacrificed those things to write on this blog today.

Life is full of opportunity costs.  We are constantly making decisions of how to use our time and other resources.  But we don't usually stop to consider that is what we are doing.  Typically, we are so caught up in the hectic-ness of life to realize what we are sacrificing when.  And many times we have no real option but to keep on doing what we are doing.  We have responsibilities--financial and otherwise--that restrict our options.

But sometimes we do have choices that we may not realize.  It can be hard to realize those choices because it would require thinking outside the box and making choices that others in our social circle don't make.  We humans are used to thinking in more traditional ways.  We are creatures of habit.  And it is very hard to go against the herd.  It takes vision and courage.

One reason I started this blog was to help others realize that they had choices and it might be possible to live a more fulfilling life.  Like most folks, I assumed that I'd spend the bulk of my life working frantically at a job until I was in my 60s.  But then I happened upon books about voluntary simplicity and in particular the book Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vikki Robin.  I began to see a different way of living that was more sustainable and more fulfilling.  I'd love for others to have similar epiphanies.

Right now I know people who are not living their best life because they are caught up in the materialism of modern American life.  They are trying to keep up with the Joneses.  They think they cannot live without certain "necessities."  They think they'd have to win the lotto to live their lives doing things they enjoy.  But that may not be the case.

I know women who would love to be stay-at-home moms instead of being away from their kids all day at a job they don't really care about. 

I know people who would like to adopt and provide a child in need a forever home.

I know people who would like to do mission work or work in the nonprofit sector.

I know people who don't mind working, but feel they are betraying their values by working in lucrative industries where the product or services may not provide social value or may create social harm.

I know people in these situations who feel stuck.  They'd rather do something else with their time and other resources, but feel like there is no other choice.  These are middle class professional people.  And to the extent that they want to continue their current spending and standard of living, they are right.  They are stuck in their current jobs--unless they are willing to make changes.

If eating out frequently or grabbing a latte on the way to work is the priority, they are stuck.

If annual vacations to luxury resorts is the priority, they are stuck.

If driving a gas guzzling vehicle is the priority, they are stuck.

If getting professional manicures or pedicures is the priority, they are stuck.

If having a smart phone for everyone in the family is the priority, they are stuck.

If buying fashionable clothes and accessories regularly is the priority, they are stuck.

If having cable TV is the priority, they are stuck.

If sending one's kid to drama camp or classes to earn a black belt are the priority, they are stuck.

If having seen all the Oscar nominated films prior to Oscar night is the priority, they are stuck.

If eating lots of meat and/or all organic produce is the priority, they are stuck.

If filling your home with junk and needing a larger home to store all the junk are priorities, they are stuck.

But note that eating out, grabbing a latte, vacations, gas guzzling vehicles, mani/pedis, smart phones, fashions, first-run movies, and a home filled with junk--these are costs you are choosing to pay if you'd rather do something else with your life.  Following your passion may be the opportunity cost to spending your money on such luxuries and needing to keep working to pay for such luxuries.

At least out here in the 'burbs, the things I listed above tend to be considered necessities by many.  They cannot conceive of a life without such things.  But if you haven't before, I encourage you to try to imagine life without them.  Ask yourself if these things are truly necessities or if you might live without them.  You may be surprised by the answer you come to.

Christmas in the 'Burbs

I've thought about posting to this blog the last couple weeks.  But I thought it would be hypocritical.  As life was already in need of simplifying this time of year, making an extra effort to get time at the computer to write would have made things even less simple.  So please excuse my absence.

As a person of faith, I love Christmas.  It is a time of great joy.  And even if you are not a person of faith, it is a wonderful time to make time for merry-making with those you love.  Or at least it should be.

Ugh.  If there is a time most challenging to someone trying to live a simpler life in the suburbs, it is Christmas.  Everyone is giving everyone else presents we don't need.  But it is custom and expected.  People wouldn't think to do something different.  It is just an expected part of life.  Even our pastor got into it one year, publicly noting to the congregation that Starbuck's gift cards would be particularly appreciated.

To the extent that I feel our family cannot get around gift giving sometimes, I try to have us give baked goods that we make.  My thought is that if someone eats it, it at least won't end up in the landfill.  But making time for baking can be a challenge when so much is going on this time of year.

And at this time of year, everyone's having parties, most of which require a gift of some kind.  This is particularly true for the kids' parties.  Even though our family gives very few gifts amongst us--mostly just small things for the kids--we end up spending more than normal due to the parties.  I don't want to be a wet blanket and deny our kids going to these parties.  So, I just wonder at how much everyone is spending.  And I worry how much debt they are taking on.  I'm sure others in our social circle think we're either stingy and/or impoverished to not be giving so many gifts.  We're definitely weird by comparison.

I'm used to all that.  It is irksome, but I suppose it is tolerable.  But there was an added dimension this year.  This was the first Christmas I was on social media.  Wow, how depressing and sad. 

We had a particularly full house at Christmas this year.  At some point on Christmas day, I stole away a sanity break and looked at Facebook.  Typically I enjoy seeing my friends' cute posts of their children (human, feline or canine) and memes about various spiritual or social justice topics.  But on Christmas I was surprised at what I saw.  It was not even midday when I checked Facebook, but already there was a steady stream of images involving gifts.  Most were pictures of kids and/or kid gifts.  Kids with prized toys.  Kids with a bunch of used wrapping paper.  Kids next to piles of gifts, some wrapped, some not.  Clearly, the gifts were the focus of the day.  Again, as a person of faith, that was a shock.  That is not what Christmas is all about.

Let me say that I was not raised in a religiously observant household.  In fact, the family in which I was raised used to do the same thing.  But what struck me was that most of the posts were from families who were church-goers.  But at the end of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, even the title character could tell you that presents are not the real meaning of Christmas.  We all love that story, but I don't think we really believe its message.

My husband and I have mindfully taken a different approach at our home.  We preemptively arrange to not do a lot of presents.  And the ones we do have, we don't open until later in the day.  We focus on other fun things.  We make yummy meals together and we play games.  To direct our attention to the reason for the day, I begin the day by leading the kids in a Bible Study of the nativity story in the New Testament.  We end the day with a walk around the neighborhood to enjoy the Christmas lights.  And we watch a Christmas movie.  Second year in a row, we watched White Christmas this year. 

Those are the things that are the most fun: spending time together.  I look back at my childhood Christmases.  No matter how we spread it out.  No matter how big the pile of presents under the tree.  Once the unwrapping was over on Christmas morning, there was a let-down feeling.  So that is it?  Even when I got stuff I liked.  It was sad, we spent the rest of the day doing our own thing and not doing anything together.  We just played with our respective toys.  It was so empty.  At this point in my life, I could probably only list on one hand the number of presents I even remember getting.  Stuff like that doesn't make lasting memories.  But I believe that the fun stuff our family does together does make lasting memories.  That is what counts.

But you do feel alone when you realize what your neighbors are all doing.  It is not easy to go against the tide and do something different from those around you.  It is well worth it though.

The Holiday Season

We are now in what is probably the most challenging time of year for those who crave or try to adhere to a simpler, less hectic, less consumerist way of life.  At this time of year in particular, the dominant culture whips everyone up into a frenzy of materialism and overspending.

This makes my husband and I sad.  For a number of reasons.  People are chasing things that in the end won't make them happy for more than a brief period at most.  Meanwhile, they are doing destructive things like spending more than they should, incurring debt and foregoing spending on things with longer lasting value (e.g., retirement accounts, kids' college savings account).  And to us, as people of faith, it is particularly upsetting that all this is done in the name of Jesus.  The Prince of Peace was born in an animal stable as a peasant.  It makes no sense to us to remember his birth by spoiling our children and exceeding our credit card limits.

So, I have a couple of thoughts to share that I hope might be particularly apropos and helpful this time of year.

For those who are Christ followers, I encourage you to re-focus on why we celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas, Christmas and Epiphany.  The Advent Conspiracy movement is working hard to help us do that.  Their website is: http://www.adventconspiracy.org/.  It helps us to avoid the secular trappings of the season to celebrate in a manner that is more in line with our faith. 

Another resource you might consider is the 2007 film What Would Jesus Buy?  It was produced by Morgan Spurlock, a West Virginia filmmaker who came to prominence with the documentary Super Size Me.  What Would Jesus Buy? is an odd film.  It follows a band of (what I take to be) performance artists who assume the persona of a flamboyant preacher and his choir who travel the country in the days before Christmas preaching the gospel of the anti-materialism as the "Church of Stop Shopping."  At times, What Would Jesus Buy? was someone offensive to me because they caricature my religion (or at least aspects of it) and seem to denigrate the sacred (like baptism).  But I always try to keep an open mind and there were definitely parts of the film that were very engaging, and thought-provoking.  I particularly found insightful the people interviewed about their attitudes towards Christmas.  It made me very sad to hear so many express that the holiday was only about buying a lot of stuff.  That alone I find spiritually vacuous, but what I found even more tragic was the attitudes of parents who expressed that they needed to move heaven and earth, do whatever was necessary to give their kids lots of stuff to open on Christmas Day.  I don't even know how to express my profound sadness over such cultural perversion over a beautiful holiday with a very different meaning at its core. 

In my opinion, the Advent Conspiracy and questioning our perversion of Christmas is much more fruitful that the effort by Focus on the Family and others to get retailers to use the phrase "Merry Christmas" instead of the more inclusive "Happy Holidays."  I hold the birth of my Savior as sacred, and find it patently offensive when retailers exploit it to make money.  As a Christian, I much prefer the broader term "holidays" to the more explicit exploitation of the birth of Jesus.

Here is something else.  To some of you, this will seem really radical, but my husband and I have also never indoctrinated our children into the modern Santa Claus myth.  We believe in being honest and don't want to ever give them reason to not trust us.  We also don't want them to believe in magical fairies who dump lots of toys on well-behaved kids from affluent families but somehow don't stop at the homes of well-behaved kids from families with less income.  And as people of faith, we don't want a mythical elf to compete in any way with Jesus Christ. 

If you think this is an extreme approach to the Santa myth, I encourage you watch a wonderful, insightful documentary from A&E's Biography series on Santa Claus.  It was first aired in 2005.  The episode traces the roots of the Santa myth as a tool for modern retailers to the modern Hollywood deification of the character.  As you watch the episode, you will begin to realize the term "deification" is not an exaggeration.  One aspect of the episode that particularly got my attention was when one Hollywood interviewee described the modern concept of Santa Claus as like God for grown ups.  Wow. 

Even if you are not a Christian or if you are not a person of any faith, this time of year is still hectic and stressful.  There are social customs in our country that make it quite a challenge to avoid over-spending.  For years when we were younger, my husband and I felt the need to buy presents for so many people in our lives.  As if there was some shame in not giving someone junk they didn't need and probably didn't want. 

For years, I also didn't question all the stuff I was gifted.  That was part of life.  But after a while, I began to realize what a burden it was.  I felt obligated to make room for stuff, even if I didn't like it.  Someone had given it to me, it would be ungrateful to throw it out or give it away.  My home became cluttered with stuff like that.  I began to think of all the money we spend giving each other such gifts.  And all the time we waste trying to figure out what to do with it when we receive it and the emotional energy we use feeling guilty that we really want to throw it out. 

So, now our family gives few presents.  We give presents to our kids--more on that in a minute.  But few to adults or anyone outside our family.  We agree with the notion of showing appreciation for all the nice folks who make our lives better throughout the year, but now we only give gifts that can be consumed.  We enjoy baking once a year and we share that bounty with people whom we appreciate and want to thank.  They can eat it or share it with someone else, but it is not going to take room on their shelves gathering dust until they get the gumption to throw it out.  And if I say so myself, our baking is pretty good, so it is a treat to receive our cookies and muffins.

It is difficult for all of us this time of year, but it is particularly difficult for parents, in large part to the cultural perpetuation of the Santa myth and the efforts of retailers.  Even though we homeschool and don't watch much TV, even our kids are not immune from the frenzy of Christmas and the cultural expectation that the holiday is for receiving gifts.  So as a parent, it is a tough situation to deal with.  We do our best. 

We try to talk to our kids throughout the season to remind them why we celebrate Christmas, to remind them that Santa Claus is a myth invented by retailers to sell more stuff, and to just enjoy each other's company.  We give some gifts to the kids, but we try to not give many.  We don't want that to be the main focus of the day.  We try to do gifts at other times so as to not confuse our children about why we celebrate Christmas.  Instead, we have a birthday party for Jesus.  We cook together to have a special meal or two.  We also make a special cake, which our kids like to decorate.  We put a ton of candles on it because Jesus was born about 2000 years ago.  We sing "Happy Birthday" to him and enjoy his cake.  We play games.  We take a walk at night to see the Christmas lights in the neighborhood.  We drink hot cocoa to warm us up.  We watch a fun Christmas movie at the end of the celebrations.  It is an absolutely fun day.  We don't just open a lot of presents, then spend the day apart with those presents.  We spend the day together, which is a lot more meaningful.

One last thought I want to share with you about the season's frenzy of gift giving.  Even if you aren't swayed by the harm done to our wallets or the perversion of a sacred religious holiday or the space/time/effort wasted on buying things people don't want, there is another reason why buying a lot of presents may not be the way to go. 

In our modern culture, we've demanded access to a plethora of cheap consumer goods.  These types of goods make up the bulk of holiday gift-giving.  What we in the West don't often stop to consider is the high cost of making these cheap goods available for easy purchase.  We may see the "made in China" or "made in Bangladesh" mark on the goods, but in our hectic lives, we may give that no thought.  We should. 

Workers in developing nations are leading lives of misery to make those goods for our markets.  Some are so miserable in their dehumanizing work environments that they take their own lives: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/06/01/china.foxconn.inside.factory/. 

Many are forced to work poverty wages in unsafe conditions.  Some are modern day slaves, but others nominally agree to such conditions due to desperation in economies with few other options.  Many are children.

I encourage you--with some trepidation--to look at the link below.  It contains a heart-wrenching photo and article about the collapse in April of this year of a factory in Bangladesh.  1129 human beings died in that tragedy, and 2515 other human beings were injured.  Some of us heard of the tragedy, but may have paid it little mind because of our busy lives and our feeling that we are powerless to help.  Others may be unfamiliar with the story.  Either way, I encourage you to consider the article and the photo.  I encourage you to consider the human toll of the low prices for consumer goods we demand in our culture.  The electronics, the clothes, the toys.  Beyond what the frenzy does to our own finances and our souls, what about the people who produce these goods at the exploitively low prices we demand?

http://iacknowledge.net/the-most-powerful-image-youll-see-today/

Thanksgiving

OK, we're within 48 hours of the big day. 

Thanksgiving is a fabulous holiday.  The point is to give thanks to one's deity for the blessings in our lives.  And it is a secular holiday, so even if you believe in no deity, you can still take time out to be mindful of your good fortune.  Modern medicine has proven that such mindfulness contributes to a range of physical and mental health benefits.

Beyond giving thanks for blessings, a secondary point to Thanksgiving is to gather together with others.  We spend time with family and/or friends.  It is considered less than ideal to spend the holiday alone.  In my adult life, when I've known folks who would be alone on the holiday, I always invite them to join my family.  They are always glad to get the invite.  It would be depressing to spend Thanksgiving by oneself.

Note that both giving thanks (or mindfulness) and spending times with loved ones are quintessentially part of the ethos of voluntary simplicity.  So in some ways, for those who embrace a simpler life, Thanksgiving is our most important holiday.  What could be better than gathering together with people you love (or hopefully at least like) to eat some yummy food and spend some quality time.

But in my lifetime, I've seen Thanksgiving become less and less recognizable. 

First, it degenerated to a day when people sit in front of the TV watching football all day, maybe while munching on a turkey drumstick.  Despite being native Texans, our family watches only one football game a year--typically the Super Bowl.  And frankly even then, we're only in it for the nachos. To me, if you are staring at a TV screen all day and screaming for some gladiator to mercilessly tackle another, you have overlooked the point of Thanksgiving.

And there have always been issues about going overboard with the feast. Some women (and occasionally men) who are responsible for preparing the feast for their families feel tremendous stress to provide a dining experience that Martha Stewart with her team of staff could produce. I know women who get up in the middle of the night and are virtually slaves of their own kitchen on Thanksgiving while everyone else is elsewhere having fun.  They fret for weeks over concocting the right menu.  Then they don't get to enjoy the day because they are trying to produce a dizzying array of dishes in a finite timeframe.  They are worried about being judged or not adequately impressing their guests.  Again, that misses the point of Thanksgiving.

But by far, the worst perversion of Thanksgiving has come in recent years with the encroachment of the commercial exploitation of Christmas.  I am a Christian of over a quarter century, so I can tell you with some authority that no where in either the Hebrew Scripture or the New Testament is there even a suggestion that one must stand in line to buy a Play Station or plasma screen TV in order to properly celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.

It always made me sad that after the simple calm and gratitude of Thanksgiving, people would head out the very next day to spend hours in stores.  It seemed like a cruel irony.  We spend time giving thanks, then we run around like maniacs trying to accumulate more and more because apparently what we just gave thanks for was insufficient.

However, things got worse over time.  At least initially Black Friday started at a normal time.  We could enjoy our Thanksgiving and recover a bit Thursday night and Friday morning.  But then retailers began to open their doors earlier and earlier Friday morning.  I began to know people who would plan their Thanksgiving around that.  They had to finish Thanksgiving at an earlier hour, so they could go to bed early to wake up early to get to the stores.  How perverse!

But then a few years ago, the unthinkable began to happen.  Some retailers began to open for a few hours on Thursday evening to get a jump start on Friday shopping.  I wasn't even aware of this until a friend of mine explained that she and a friend were combining their families' Thanksgiving celebration so they could finish early and hit the special Thursday sale while the husbands watched football.  This is a dear friend of mine.  Her plans just depressed me more than I can say.

Meanwhile, the deals have gotten more and more attractive--luring more and more customers in either on Thursday or at crazy early hours on Friday morning.  The term "door buster" was coined with sad irony because people desperate to get limited deals on waffle irons and computers trampled other human beings in the process. 

And that is after many camp for days, sometimes as much as a week, outside a store to get such deals.  Think about that.  Where does one go to the bathroom?  It is cold at night outside, even in the Sunbelt.  Forcibly, one has totally foregone any feigned attempt to celebrate Thanksgiving if one spent it in a tent outside a Best Buy.  Even if it is the biggest TV or snazziest iPad or gaming device, is it really worth days of your life when you might be doing other things?  What a deeply sad state of affairs.

On social media, I've seen people decry the deterioration of Thanksgiving in this way.  So I know I'm not the last person in America to feel this way, though it sometimes feels like it.  Many such persons vilify the retailers for offering such deals at such times.  There is some validity to that finger wagging.  But others rightfully point out that the retailers are simply meeting a demand.  It is the consuming public that is to blame for this state of affairs. 

Personally, I think there is some truth to both sides.  We see a similar situation in the disastrous war on drugs in this country.  We vilify the parasitic, often violent drug dealers.  They are to blame and if we just round them all up, the problem would go away.  Only it doesn't work that way because our nation has such a huge demand for narcotics that others rise up to fill that demand.  I would never defend drug dealers.  I think they are exploitive and greedy, doing unconscionable harm.  But it is too easy to just blame the dealers when the demand is apparently so great.  We need to look at our own contribution to the situation in creating the demand the dealers meet. 

Very similar dynamic with regard to retail sales at Thanksgiving.  I do hold responsible the stores that offer these crazy door busters at insane times.  But even if Walmart and Target refrained, other stores would spring up to fill the void because a lot of otherwise sane folks are willing to sacrifice Thanksgiving for cheap consumer goods.  Shame on us all.

But I invite you to be different, to take the path less traveled so to speak.  I encourage you to focus on the true meaning of Thanksgiving--to create a simple and enjoyable meal so you can spend the day just relaxing and enjoying the company of your friends and/or family. 

Moreover, I encourage you to not be a part of this modern cultural madness.  My husband and I are frugal and try to be good stewards of our finances.  We buy things when they are on sale whenever possible.  But I'm not even looking at any of the ads for this week and no one in our family is going shopping Thursday or Friday.

I know others take similar pledges.  On social media, I saw one young man dismiss all the handwringing about the perversion of Thanksgiving by pointing out that if we abstain from all the consumption, we are not impacted in the least by the madness of Black Friday spilling over onto Thanksgiving.  I was struck by what an insensitive, privileged statement this was.  Based on the context of this statement, I glean that this man was well-educated and had a good job that did not require him to work on Thanksgiving.  Not everyone has those advantages. 

I know several people who work at grocery stores who have to work all day on Thursday.  And it has nothing to do with door busters.  Their corporate bosses decided it was important to stay open for all the folks on Thursday who begin to make the mashed potatoes but run out of butter or who realize they didn't buy enough sparkling apple juice for everyone who will be at their table.  Don't forget the folks working this other end of retail sales at grocery stores.  If you pledge to abstain from shopping during Thanksgiving, make sure you don't breach that pledge by running to the Ralph's or Piggly Wiggly for last minute groceries.  Plan ahead, make sure you have what you need for all your recipes, and find work-arounds on Thursday if you don't.

In closing, I just encourage you to do your part to take back Thanksgiving from the retail madness and restore it to its original, beautiful purpose.  Take time to appreciate your life and the people in it.  Enjoy!

Back to the Backstory

OK, so I explained how I first came across the concept of voluntary simplicity by accident at a difficult time in my life.  I was running fast on the treadmill wondering if this was all that life had in store, hoping there might be more.  I was so moved by Mr. Shut's book.  And I sensed real truth in the words and ideas I found in its pages.  (Actually, Truth with a capital "t.")  The life I was living did not seem to match my core values as a Christ follower.  My life did not immediately change, but I did have a huge epiphany that scrambling to climb the corporate ladder was pointless and not what I wanted out of life.

But my life did not change over night for several reasons. 

First, a lot of folks wish they had the opportunity to be on that ladder.  I had worked very hard and had good luck.  Plenty of folks I went to law school with would have given much for access to the ladder.  And I was doing a better job climbing it than others on the ladder with me at that point.  Moreover, the nature of the job market in corporate America was such that if I stepped off the ladder, I would never get that opportunity again.  Once off the ladder, someone else takes your spot and you are deemed to not be qualified enough to climb any more.  I'm not a rash person, so I didn't just finish Mr. Shut's book, then walk into my boss's office and quit.

Plus by that time, my husband and I were parents, and we were anticipating the adoption of our second child very soon.  We also had a mortgage, car loans, as well as my student loans.  So, jumping off the treadmill immediately seemed implausible and irresponsible.  But something in my heart had changed.  I had become very aware of the futility of office politics and the emptiness of the suburban mini-mansions filled with stylish furnishings.

During that time of my life, when I thought about what did fill my life with meaning, what I wanted to fill it with instead of workplace pettiness and well-appointed homes, it was clear to me the answer was my family.  I had a husband I thought was pretty awesome, but we didn't get to spend enough time together.  We had an amazing toddler whom we never got to see except for brief period right before and after she went to bed.  For years, I'd heard that for working parents, "quality time" was key.  But I was finding that quality was rather pointless if the quantity was so scarce.  We had so little time with our daughter, we were about to have a second child in our family and we were scrambling to find time to do laundry or get some prepackaged food from the store.  My husband and I both had such demanding corporate jobs, we weren't living.  In retrospect, we were barely hanging on.

Finally, I had an even greater epiphany.  I was reading a number of books on voluntary simplicity at that point.  (More on those later!)  And I had realized that becoming a one income family would greatly simplify our lives and give us more time as a family.  My husband was on a business trip when I had this big epiphany, so I noodled on it a couple days before I got a chance to share it with him.  By then, I had thought it through more and realized that for a number of reasons, at least on paper, it made more sense for him to quit his job.  I made more money and he had been in his profession much longer than me, so he would more easily be able to get back into the work force later on in time.  He had been traveling in remote parts of Oklahoma visiting his company's oil fields when after several days he was somewhere where he got a bit of cell phone signal.  We only had a moment, so after he shared a bit about his trip, I blurted out my epiphany quickly.  He was outside on top of a windy hill, he asked, "You want me to do what?"  I repeated my brainstorm.  The phone went silent, I thought maybe he had lost signal.  I asked if he were still there.  His voice dropped deadpan and he simply said, "We're going to have to talk when I get home."

We did eventually talk about the idea at length.  Pretty quickly, he agreed about the logic of having one of us stay home, particularly after we adopted our second child.  It took more discussion, but soon he agreed that all signs seemed to point to him being the stay-at-home parent.  We were both so thrilled.  We made the decision with time to spare, so we had time to work at scaling back our spending, paying off some of our debt, and stocking away some savings.  By the time our second child came along, we were in good shape for him to leave his career.

So, we had several years when I was the sole breadwinner and we had more time as a family.  My husband took over all the household responsibilities, so when I was home, we could focus on being together and enjoying each other's company--not rushing to the dry cleaner's while trying to figure out we'd feed everyone for supper.  Those were good times.  But as I progressed in my career, I was constantly working to set barriers and eek out a personal life.  It was always a struggle.  And I had reason to fear that eventually I would lose in the battle to not have my career consume my life.  There were some sane, humane people in the managerial ranks at my company who had been somewhat supportive of my efforts at work-life balance.  But I could see the writing on the wall.  Those folks would be retiring before long and the men who were poised to take their place were single-minded and unsympathetic to anything but the bottom line. 

Due to this situation, I decided to make a huge career change and go into academia.  It is notoriously competitive to become a tenure-track professor, it is something people in my profession carefully plan and prepare for before going on the market.  However, on a last minute whim one year, I threw my hat in the ring and got very lucky.  It was scary.  Accepting the job meant giving up not only a very lucrative and stable career with my company, but my husband would be forever giving up on his career since we had to move to an entirely different part of the country where his resume would be less relevant.  But we took the plunge.  The lure of a much more flexible schedule and summers off at least in some respects was appealing.  I was also excited to do work that I thought I would find more meaningful.  I like mentoring young people, exploring ideas and writing.

Initially, my schedule was pretty good and life was great.  I've always enjoyed the people I worked with, but as an academic I particularly loved and respected my colleagues.  What a diverse, dedicated, talented group of folks.  But there were administrative issues.  We had three deans in my first three years.  All of that became more and more of a drain for the school's focus, and to my great disappointment the office politics became worse than anything I've ever experienced in any other workplace. 

Meanwhile, my children were getting older and I had felt like I had really missed out.  Their childhood had passed me by!  I'd always hoped and planned that we'd adopt again, but I blinked and found myself in my 40s.  It was dawning on me this was not something I could continue to push off into the nebulous future.  And in the midst of all this, my husband had gone back to school and had begun a new career in a helping profession.  The writing on the wall had become clear that now I needed to step off the career freeway for a while.

So that brings me up to the present day.  Homeschooling stay-at-home mom looking to possibly adopt again.  And finally having the time for life that I've craved for years.  Though even without a paid gig, there are still not enough hours in the day!

I want to flag that that has been just my journey towards voluntary simplicity, but that is certainly not the only path.  I've known people who've taken very different paths.  You don't have to be a parent or a white collar worker or married to embrace simplicity.  I think all it really takes is an awareness of the emptiness of our modern American lifestyle that focuses on working to consume more than we need, and a hope that there might be another way.

I'm here to encourage you that there is!

Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut (Part III: Random Passages That I Liked)

I am a reader.  I have earned several degrees, practiced a profession where reading was a mainstay, and then I spent the last part of my professional career as an academic where I read even more.  And on top of all those motivations, I also enjoy reading for pleasure. 

I've realized over the years that I'm a fairly kinesthetic learner.  I cannot just sit still and read.  To take in what I'm reading, I have to underline, highlight and/or make notes.  When I read a book or article, I like to flag what is most of interest to me and ideas I want to come back to. 

I took this approach when reading Simpler Living, Compassionate Life  for the first time years ago.  If you saw my copy of the book, it is marked up with a lot of yellow highlighting.

I am a fairly prolific highlighter, so I cannot share with you everything I flagged when reading the book.  But I'd like to share with you some passages that particularly got my attention and made an impression on me.  They are sort of a synopsis of not just this one particular book, but of the things that drew me to the concept of voluntary simplicity more generally.

My hope is that these random passages will whet your appetite and you'll read this amazing book as well.  In fact, I include page numbers so you can read these passage in their full context. 

And in doing so, maybe you'll find your own passages in the book that impact you in some meaningful way.  Enjoy!

p. 26 "Americans comprise only 5% of the world's population but consume 30% of its resources."

p. 27 "While voluntary poverty can be a beautiful offering of one's life, poverty itself can crush not only the body but the spirit as well."

p. 27 "Perhaps the prophetic word that simple living has to offer materialism centers around justice and freedom:  justice that can be lived through reduced consumption and more equitable distribution of the earth's finite resources, and acting justly toward the rest of creation:  freedom that allows each of us to move from life-draining acquisitiveness toward a joyful, generous spirit that recognizes the worth of all God's creatures."

p. 27  "But in our driven busyness we do not take time to listen.  We no longer know who we are and the 'still, small voice' is lost in the cacophony of voices urging us on to the next task.  Lacking the ability to listen and follow God's voice and our own inner direction, we become increasingly susceptible to the marketing of the good life.  We lose touch with the understanding that who we are is larger than simply what we do.  Into this hyper-productive life walks simplicity.  Simplicity requires us to slow down, to consider how our lives reflect who we are and what we value. . . If the abundant life is more than just consuming, it is also more than just producing."

p. 34 "There is no doubt that some purchases permanently enhance our lives.  But how much of what we consume merely keeps us moving on a stationary treadmill?  The problem with the treadmill is not only that it is stationary, but also that we have to work long hours to stay on it... the consumerist treadmill and long hour jobs have combined to form an insidious cycle of 'work-and-spend.'  Employers ask for long hours.  The pay creates a high level of consumption.  People buy houses and go into debt; luxuries become necessities; Smiths keep up with Joneses. . . Capitalism has brought a dramatically increased standard of living, but at the cost of a much more demanding worklife."

p. 35 "The juggling act between job and family is another problem area.  Half the population now says they have too little time for their families.  The problem is particularly acute for women: in one study, half of all employed mothers reported it caused either 'a lot' or an 'extreme' level of stress.  The same proportion feel that 'when I'm at home I try to make up to my family for being away at work, and as a result I rarely have any time for myself.'  This stress has placed tremendous burdens on marriages.  Two-earner couples have less time together, which researchers have found reduces the happiness and satisfaction of a marriage.  These couples often just don't have enough time to talk to each other."

p. 36 "Serious as these problems are, the most alarming development may be the effect of the work explosion on the care of children.  According to economist Sylvia Hewlett, 'child neglect has become endemic in our society.'  A major problem is that children are increasingly left alone, to fend for themselves while their parents are at work. . . Hewlett links the 'parenting deficit' to a variety of problems plaguing our country's youth: poor performance in school, mental problems, drug and alcohol use, and teen suicide.  According to another expert, kids are being 'cheated out of childhood. . . There is a sense that adults don't care about them."

p. 38 "In the past I read books that told me how to get more done during the day, how to find that extra hour so you could study French or learn photography.  I would try to do as many things as I could at one time.  Now I focus on doing less and slowing down.  I try to stop rushing, to practice mindfulness, to practice meditation.  I keep working at it, but still I have that nagging feeling--hurry, hurry."

p. 53 "Our hard and very urgent task is to realize that nature is not primarily a property to be possessed, but a gift to be received with admiration and gratitude.  How differently we would live if we always sensed that the nature around us is full of desire to tell us the great story of God's love, to which it points."

p. 67 "All of us struggle with the place of money in our lives.  There are no easy answers.  Yet whether rich or poor, by either American or global standards, money is surely one of our culture's most prevalent and powerful idols:  promising that which it cannot finally deliver."

p. 67 "Idolatry, whatever its object, represents the enshrinement of any other person or thing in the very place of God.  Idolatry embraces some person or thing, instead of God, as the source and rationalization of the moral significance of this life in the world for, at least, the idolater, though not, necessarily, for anybody else at all."

p. 75 "Now consider our economic system (the 'Big Economy,' Rasmussen, p. 111), the dominant global economy as it has developed in Western culture (and spread through the world).  Rather than a circle, we might envision a line.  At one end, capital, labor, and natural resources are input.  Along the way 'things' are produced, advertising creates a desire for those things, which we then consume.  Along the way, some people reap profits.  But, also along the way, a lot of waste is produced. . . The Big Economy hopes that the Great Economy will somehow assimilate all waste, a hope we now know is futile; the waste generated each year in the United States would fill a convoy of 10-ton garbage trucks 145,000 miles long--over halfway to the moon. . . All inputs (including capital and labor, which are also ultimately dependent on a healthy world) come from the Great Economy, and all wastes return to it.  Yet the Big Economy refers to its effects on the natural world as 'externalities;' that is, these effects are not taken into account within our monetary economy.  Examples of externalities include water pollution, soil erosion, ozone depletion and toxic waste. . . These externalities profoundly affect people and places--in our own backyards and around the world. . . Although economic status plays an important role in the location of toxic waste sites, race is the leading factor."

p. 78 "Worldwide, 40,000 children die of hunger-related disease or malnutrition every day.  If we Americans ate 10 percent less meat (it takes 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of red meat), enough grain would be saved to more than feed those children (Robbins and Patton, May All Be Fed, chapter 2)."

p. 83 "Adam Smith did not write as a Calvinist theologian, but his view of the human being is not far removed from that of many Scottish Calvinist of his day.  They, too, were suspicious of expecting too much from human sympathy or love.  They recognized with Smith that most people's actions were basically selfish."

p. 88 " We have learned not to impose simple ideals naively on complex situations but to analyze them thoroughly and then find ways to move toward Christian goals within them. . . In our opposition to individualism and to nationalism, we affirm that we as individuals need one another and that nations, too, need one another, as we all need God."

p. 91 "American children under the age of 13 have more spending money--$230 a year--than the 300 million poorest people in the world."

p. 91 "The richest billion people in the world have created a form of civilization so acquisitive and profligate that the planet is in danger.  The lifestyle of this top echelon--the car drivers, beef eaters, soda drinkers, and throwaway consumers--constitutes an ecological threat unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. . .  Ironically, abundance has not even made people terribly happy.  In the United States, repeated opinion polls of people's sense of well-being show that no more Americans are satisfied with their lot now than they were in 1957.  Despite phenomenal growth in consumption, the list of wants has grown faster still.  Of course, the other extreme from overconsumption--poverty--is not solution to environmental or human problems:  it is infinitely worse for people and equally bad for the environment.  Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert.  If environmental decline results when people have either too little or too much, we must ask ourselves:  How much is enough?"

p. 97  "The basic value of a sustainable society, the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule, is simple:  Each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations."

p. 100 "It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy should be cheap and plentiful."

p. 119 "To live eschatologically in this sense is not simply to enjoy hopeful images from time to time.  The hope for the Kingdom freed early Christians from concern for success or security in the present order. . . When God is understood as omnipotent, Christians have an assureance of ultimate success for their causes regardless of the most immediate outcome of the efforts.  But, today, we do not perceive God as forcing divine decisions upon the world."

p. 127 "One of the most often-mentioned ways to provide more work is to reduce the work week and spread jobs around.  This can be done in a way that both employees and employers benefit.  For instance, some companies find that people will accept a lower salary if their hourly wage goes up.  Since productivity tends to rise when people work shorter hours, both the people and the company would benefit:  there would be higher productivity for the company and a higher hourly wage for the people."

p. 133 "The aim of sufficiency is that everyone shall have enough of the things that are needed for a reasonably secure and fulfilling life. . . We are concerned first about basic needs: pure water, food and nutrition, clothing, shelter, health care, literacy and some kind of meaningful work to do. . . Individuals do not have identical requirements and likings in order to be happy.  But what any one person may include in the idea of what is sufficient for himself or herself is necessarily limited by the ideas of others about their sufficiency and the recognition that some minimal sufficiency for everyone takes precedence--whenever a choice is necessary--over anyone's right to enjoy a surplus."

p. 137 "Consumerism itself is the substitute, a most unsatisfactory, through addictive, substitute for that which makes human life meaningful and fulfilling--loving, caring relationships with one another, in which we accept and affirm our dependence on one another, and all the ways in which we may free each other for everything true and good and creative that each of us has in himself or herself to be or to become.  In short, consumerism is a substitute for community.  The abundance to which Jesus pointed was explicitly not the abundance of possessions.  It was the abundance of the restored relationship, the God-relationship.  It was the freedom to enjoy the community--the giving-and-receiving relationship with one another--for which we were created."

p. 146 "The radical critics of capitalism and promoters of Spartan rusticity among the advocates of the simple life would be well advised to acknowledge that material progress and urban life can frequently be compatible with spiritual, moral, or intellectual concerns."

p. 147 "Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading.  As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums.  It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar."

p. 148 "One of Gandhi's American friends once confessed to the Indian leader that it was easy and liberating for him to discard most of the superfluous clutter in his life and his household, but he could not part with his large collection of books.  'Then don't give them up,' Gandhi replied.  'As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it.  If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you.'  This means that simplicity is indeed more a state of mind than a particular standard of living."

p. 155 "Our freedom from sin allows us to serve others.  Before, all our serving was for our benefit, a means to somehow get right with God.  Only because the grace of God has been showered upon us are we enabled to give that same grace to others."

p. 167 "Consumption patterns of the 'Northern' countries and the 'Western' countries are obscene by global standards, yet there is no apparent end in sight to the guttony. . .Nevertheless, the underlying economic logic of an economy based on unlimited growth remains largely unchallenged in public discourse. . . The reasons for this have as much to do with arguments about social justice as they do with shameless consumerism. After all, growth has become the only means that late capitalism has devised to cope with the increasingly evident problem of inequity."

p. 182 "We are trapped in a maze of competing attachments.  One moment we make decisions on the basis of sound reason and the next moment out of fear of what others will think of us.  We have no unity or focus around which our lives are oriented.  Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insance attachment to things.  We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic.  It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality.  We crave things we neither need nor enjoy.  'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.'  Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over.  We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. . . Hoarding we call prudence."

Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut (Part II: Evy McDonald's Essay)

I was plugging along reading Simpler Living, Compassionate Life as a daily devotional.  The essays and excerpts were so varied, it was really hit or miss for me.  But the essay that first (and most) gave me an "a-ha" moment was Evy McDonald's.  It was entitled "Spending Money as if Life Really Matters."  I really encourage you to take a read.

The introductory bio on Ms. McDonald described her as a former nurse who had gone on to found the New Road Map Foundation, which focuses on educating and enabling people to "shift to low-consumption, high-fulfillment lifestyles."  In that mission, they rely primarily on Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's book Your Money or Your Life.  I had never heard of that book until reading Ms. McDonald's essay, but afterwards I couldn't wait to read it and it eventually had a real impact on my thinking.  But in the meantime, Ms. McDonald's essay was a great introduction to the concepts in that book and really wetted my appetite.

A number of points in Ms. McDonald's essay really caught my attention.

First, she observed, "Though history shows that there was a constant tension between material acquisition and spiritual transcendence, most households until the twentieth century were not consumers but producers and manufacturers.  People grew their own food, built their own homes, barns and furniture, poured their own candles and sewed their own clothes."  This passage really opened my eyes.  At the time, I was so in the trenches in my career, I had become rather myopic.  It may sound silly but it never occurred to me that the lifestyle I was living (and that most folks in my social circles were living) was a fairly modern invention.  On some level, I guess I had assumed that through the centuries, people had always been consumers.  It was just that we had consumed less and what we had consumed was different in the olden days.  Even though I had read books like Little House on the Prairie as a kid, I guess I had lost sight that that lifestyle was not unique to families whose patriarch yanked them out of civilization to homestead on the frontier.  And it began to dawn on me that if the consumption lifestyle has not always been, maybe it will not always be.  Just maybe there might be another way to live our precious time on this planet--even if we live in large metropolitan areas and have jobs.

Second, Ms. McDonald described that prior to the Great Depression, "social innovators were planning self-sufficient communities that would give people a sense of belonging and integrate urban and rural towns."  She cites David Shi's book The Simple Life in this description.  However, she explains that with the advent of the economic collapse of the Great Depression, these plans fell apart.  Then once the economy recovered, "[l]eading economists felt that perpetual economic growth was possible."  From there, a "theology of consumption began to invade our culture--and our churches.  Slowly, almost imperceptively, we wandered away from the foundational teachings of Jesus--sharing our wealth, identifying with the marginalized, living a life of grateful stewardship--and began to identify our worth with how much money we made or how many possessions we owned." 

Wow!  I really want to read Mr. Shi's book.  Those pre-Depression communities of self-sufficiency sounded exciting.  I've never heard of those.  With our hussle bussle modern lives, most of us have really lost a sense of community.  We don't even know our neighbors in more than a superficial way most of the time.

But I had definitely heard of and been impacted by the belief in "perpetual economic growth" and "theology of consumption."  At the time, my husband and I worked for publicly traded companies fairly obsessed with their stock price.  Everyone was always wanting to show more revenues, more expansion, more everything.  Staying the same was not acceptable.  Shrinking was catastrophe. 

And that thinking about the corporate bottom line infects our thinking in so many other ways.  Schools need to increase their number of graduates and the passage by their students of key tests.  Nonprofits need to show they are helping more people and increasing grants.  We are often judged professionally not by how well we do but by how much improvement we can prove.  But in the back of my mind, when I had a moment to breath, I would sometimes wonder whether it was always possible to grow in tangible ways.  At some point, isn't growth more difficult to achieve?  Is such growth even valuable if you've gotten so big and it takes so much effort to grow a little more?

And the theology of consumption is not just a secular idea.  When I was young, I didn't like going to church.  There were a lot of reasons, but one was that church seemed to often be a chance for people to show off their fancy clothes.  I never had a lot of clothes, fancy or otherwise.  This was a distraction for me, and I never understood how showing off one's clothes squared with Jesus's teaching.  I couldn't reconcile the two, and sadly it drove me away from church for many years.

It continues today to some extent.  My husband and I have felt judged even by clergy for not dressing more elegantly.  We don't wear ripped jeans and flip flops, but we also don't wear suits.  One Christmas, a deacon approached our family and to our horror asked if one (but not both) of our children would like to help the pastor at one point in the service because the child she was inviting "was dressed."  What she meant was that our invited child had taken it upon herself to wear her fanciest dress, while our other child was wearing a more modest outfit of slacks and a solid cotton shirt.  Apparently, the uninvited child wasn't fancy enough to be seen at the front of the church.  We were so disappointed in this mentality!

And it is not just clothes.  We are a culture that still judges each other based on other possessions--what kind of car, which electronics, what kind of house, what kind of furniture.  But Ms. McDonald notes how contrary that is to Jesus's teachings.  How convicting!

Later, she had a line that caught my attention.  She notes that "our affluence and consumption [have not] given us more fulfilling, happier and just ways of living" and instead "[t]oday, people admit to feeling stressed and tired with little time to care for and nuture relationships, family, friends or the environment."  She notes that researchers have indicated this trend increased from the 1970s to now. It left us "[s]atiated at the physical level, yet starved at the spiritual level."  These words really hit home.  Why was I working so hard?  It was true that I had more financial cushion than I'd ever had in my life.  But money was not the big motivator to me.  My husband and I didn't particularly like buying things.  We did enjoy traveling.  And our corporate jobs were giving us the money to go places.  But they also gave us so few vacation days that we frankly had little time to go anywhere.

Quoting Marcus Borg in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, she states: "Our culture's secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the spirit. . . It looks to the material world for satisfaction and meaning.  Its dominant values are what I call the three A's--Achievement, Affluence and Appearance."  Mr. Borg's book is a great one, but even if you aren't a person of faith, it is easy to see the emptiness and futility of a life built on those three A's.  Those values are really pointless.  They aren't sustainable or lasting.

The part of the essay that particularly got my attention was when Ms. McDonald described how her "[w]ork was the center of her life" until a particular day that changed her life.  She received a devastating medical report and was advised she would probably die within a year.  Because of her health condition, she was rapidly replaced at work because her manager did not think she would still be able to keep up with such a demanding job.  She wrote, "I had lost the job that gave me my identity, my purpose in life and my sense of self-worth, and I had been told that I was going to die."  To add insult to injury, she then found out her home had been burglarized and most of her worldly possessions were gone.  Out of the blue, in rapid succession, everything was taken away--her future, her career and her things. 

She described that God was the only place to turn, but she painfully realized that she had not been living the life she had professed:  "God only existed for me at times of crisis or convenience."  She asked herself whom she wanted to be when she died and the answer came to her: "I wanted to be a person who lived her values, understood what service was about and could love herself enough to accept God's love and love her neighbor."  She went on to explain that to make that happen, "[m]y self-centered and unhealthy relationship with money was a logical place to start learning how to live my values."  This led her to accept a friend's invitation to attend a seminar by Joe Dominguez. 

She summarized that she had two main takeaways from the seminar.  The first was "identifying how much is enough" and the second was "understanding the true definition of money."  Ms. McDonald went on to elaborate that per Joe Dominguez "enough" is "having our survival needs met (food, clothing, shelter), having possessions that bring joy and comfort and even having those few special luxuries that add to the quality of our life."  She explains that her definition of money had previously been "power, prestige, status and a way to identify where I stood in relation to other people of my profession," but Mr. Dominguez defined it in a completely different way: "Money is something for which you trade your life energy--your time."  To make this definition more comprehensible, Ms. McDonald elaborated:

Every purchase could be seen in terms of the number of hours I would need to work to pay for it.  The real cost of a $100 blouse, therefore, would be the 20 hours on the job needed to make the money to buy it.  Would I receive satisfaction from the blouse equal to 20 hours of my life?  I began to apply that question to all my purchases.

That one paragraph was a revelation (and a revolution!) to me.  I did some computations to figure out my hourly "wage" though I was a salaried employee.  I then used that number to think about how many hours of my life I had given up for various purchases I had made.  That gave me a whole new way to look at how I was spending my life and whether various purchases were a good use of my life energy.  We only have a finite amount of time in this life.  None of us knows how much.  We cannot squander our lives or put off living until retirement.

Ms. McDonald's experience rang true to me on so many levels.  I too was working crazy hours.  And around the time I read her essay, I had had some health scares of my own.  Things had turned out well, but there were some nervous times after initial doctors' reports that made me wonder if I was not long for this world.  That kind of experience is scary and stressful, but it is also valuable in helping you put things in perspective!

I loved how Ms. McDonald ended her essay:

Gradually my actions became more aligned with my values.  I discovered the truth of graceful simplicity: having a few pairs of shoes, not 70; a few blouses, not a hundred; books that are read instead of lining the shelves.  Through this process I reclaimed the most precious gift God gave me--the hours of my life--and I could begin to discover how God wanted those hours used.  In defining how much was enough for me I found time for serving, reading, watching sunsets, singing, going for a walk with friends, enjoying a concert and listing in silent prayer.  In short, a life of immeasurable wealth.

I still consume.  We all consume.  The critical step is to move from being conspicuous consumers to being conscious consumers.

Discovering what was enough for me allowed me to make that shift.  Our task now is to return to a life based on feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, raising healthy loving children, and stewarding and preserving creation.  Perhaps then each act of consumption will become a hymn of thanksgiving.

Aren't those beautiful words?  I hope they will be a joy and a blessing to you.

Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut (Part I: Overview)

In the prior post, I explained that disappointment about the outcome of an election led to a serendipitous visit to a religious bookstore where I happened to come across my first book on voluntary simplicity: Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective edited & compiled by Michael Schut.  I think I should say a bit about the book.

The book is a collection of essays and excerpts from longer pieces by various authors.  I have to admit that a lot of them did not really take root.  Many were over my head.  I'm a pretty well-educated person and I read a lot.  But as I read the book, many of the essays and excerpts seemed to presuppose background knowledge I did not have.  Some seemed to presuppose a fairly in-depth understanding of voluntary simplicity.  Others were out of my reach because they seemed to have been written for an audience who had graduated from seminary, which I have not.

Nonetheless, I persevered.  It was a really low point spiritually for me at that point in time.  And I somehow sensed that this particular book had something to teach me that would be important to help get me to a better place spiritually.

I tried to read one essay or excerpt each day as a daily devotional.  Some days this was interesting and fruitful; the reading gave me food for thought.  Other days, I got very little out of the reading and I was bored/lost. 

Nonetheless, after completing the book, there were some big picture things that stuck with me.  Our middle class way of life in the U.S. is luxurious compared to how most of our brothers and sisters live around the world.  If we scale down even a bit the level of luxuries we Americans enjoy, we will not die and we will not suffer deprivation.  Indeed, scaling down somewhat can actually lead to more abundance.  The more luxuries we insist on having, the more we typically have to work.  But by scaling back--or simplifying--we can work less and have more time.  Time is the real treasure in our life.  It is finite and precious, no matter how we try to forget or deny that.

A Vacation From Politics

Ok, so, at the end of the last few posts my bleeding heart might have shown a bit.  Whoops!

This might be a good time to make clear that I don't in any way want this blog to become political.  I have plenty of other contexts for discussing politics and policy issues.  That is not the intended focus of this blog. 

Social justice is actually extremely important to me, and that alone is a great rationale for embracing voluntary simplicity.  But there are also plenty of other rationales that have nothing to do with social justice.  If your interest in voluntary simplicity is rooted in one of those other rationales, I don't want you to be deterred by a perception that this is a political blog.  It is not, so keep reading.

One reason this will not become a political blog is that partisanship often gets in the way of the greater good and needlessly tears people apart.  It often creates divisions that were not there previously and/or accentuates differences to divide people who otherwise have much in common.  In short, partisanship is the antithesis of community, while one aspect of voluntary simplicity that appeals to me is that it promotes community.  When we slow down and eschew all the modern busyness, we focus on building relationships and helping others.

For a variety of reasons, voluntary simplicity is something that appeals to many Americans regardless of our political affiliations.  More on that later in future posts.  But until then, please recognize that voluntary simplicity is not a red thing or a blue thing.  There are Libertarians, Democrats, Independents, Republicans, Green Partiers and unregistered voters--among others--who are drawn to the values of voluntary simplicity.  People from many different backgrounds, embracing many different worldviews are dissatisfied with the superficial, materialistic rat race that has become our modern culture.  I aspire that this blog will be a place where anyone and everyone who similarly experiences such dissatisfaction can find a bit of rest for tired bones and a weary soul.

Though I don't want this blog to be political, and I'd like to have as inclusive an approach to this topic as possible, please be aware that my own political orientation is going to creep in at times.  That is inevitable.  That is part of who I am.  But my promise to you the reader is that I'll try to keep the political references to a minimum.  I'll include them only when they are important to something I'm trying to describe or express.

And any such political references will not be included in an effort to push a particular political agenda.  I myself respect and even relish that we may come from different political backgrounds.  One thing I love in life is when people who are so incredibly different actually take time to listen to one another and come to realize they really have much in common.

Simultaneously, I encourage readers to be truly open-minded when they see a political reference.  Don't write me off just because you realize we vote for different candidates.  Keep reading.  Look for the common ground. 

And there should be something for pretty much everyone.  Some people who know me well think I'm a flaming liberal, while others think I'm a corrupt conservative.  I guess it all comes down to your perspective.  Again, I encourage you to be open-minded and see through the sometimes artificial labels that modern politics uses to divide people.  Again, look for the common ground.

Believe me, I appreciate how challenging it is to be open-minded in this day and age.  In recent times, due to the options we have in where we live, as well as the media choices available, many of us opt to only listen to those who agree with our own beliefs and can help reinforce them.  This has been dubbed the "echo chamber effect."  But in truth, that approach is just a form of intellectual masturbation.  It is self-indulgent and pointless.  Further, it can be misinforming if we don't get all the facts or hear contra-arguments.  To really understand the world, we need to be exposed to different perspectives and do the hard work of discerning truth for ourselves.  The bottom line is that echo chambers waste time on many levels, and, as mentioned in prior posts, time is precious.

In closing for today, if you see something in this blog that sounds political or seems to espouse an idea with which you disagree, please stick with me.  Don't write me off.  Something attracted you to the topic of this blog.  Keep reading even if you don't agree with me 100%.  One more time: look for the common ground.

Inspiration

Our family loves books.  The public library is one of favorite places ever.  We go there at least once each week.  Usually, I spend most of our visit in the kids' section helping my daughters find books they want to read.  In the past, I did not necessarily have time to look for something I wanted to read on my own.  But in anticipation of this huge crossroads in my life, on a recent visit, I picked up several nonfiction books on topics I want to explore more in coming months. 

One book was Tammy Strobel's You Can Buy Happiness (and It's Cheap):  How One Woman Radically Simplified Her Life and How you Can Too.  (How can you not be drawn to a title like that?!)  Over the years, I've read a lot of books on simple living.  They were all fascinating and helpful in their own way.  But one thing I particularly appreciated about Ms. Strobel's book was how down-to-earth and honest she was. 

Ms. Strobel admits she is not a perfect minimalist.  She loves buying books and indulging in chocolate.  She and her husband took on debt to downsize to a tiny home.  She shares in the book how she fretted this financial step backwards made her a fraud or hypocrite. 

But I love how Ms. Strobel is very forgiving.  Perfection is not the goal, which she reminds her readers often.  That is a tough lesson for us to learn in modern America where our culture sends us the opposite message all the time.  One screw up and you are out of a job, will be sued or will ruin your kids' lives.

Working towards an ideal like voluntary simplicity takes time.  You may never get to the ideal anyhow.  That's why it's an idea.  And everyone's circumstances are different.  Learning to slow down, stop all the busyness to enjoy a higher quality of life.  That is what counts.  No guilt trips if your circumstances put you in a home or a job that meets the needs of you and your family but may not be as simple as you would ultimately like.

Ms. Strobel's book describes her journey in simplifying her life, and also tells the stories of people she knows.  I like that.  We learn from hearing each other's stories. 

Some of what I read was familiar.  I had been through experiences like those of the people described in the book.  For example, Ms. Strobel talks about her miserable early career in the corporate world.  She was on what Sonja Lyubomirsky calls the "hedonistic treadmill" in her book The How of Happiness.  Many of us deal with the stress of our hectic lives by buying something, which is only a temporary salve and distraction, but ultimately leaves us unfulfilled.  Moreover, when we're on that "hedonistic treadmill," we often make things worse in the long run.  We spend from our savings or go into debt such that we are trapped in our miserable, overly demanding jobs to pay for the stuff we're buying but don't really need.

As much as I admire her and her book, let's get something straight:  Tammy Strobel and I live very different lives. 

She is married and has a cat, but no human children.  I'm married with two human kids and two canine ones.

In their journey to simplify, Ms. Strobel and her husband eventually went carless.  They now bike all over the place.  That ain't ever going to happen in my life!  I don't even aspire to it.  I live in a sprawling metropolitan area where cars are king and the heat is life-threatening in the summer.  We'd be more than inconvenienced if we had no car.  We'd rarely be able to go anywhere and our lives would be in danger!

Ms. Strobel and her husband also moved to a tiny home consisting of 128 square feet.  That ain't ever happening in my life either.  Again, I don't even aspire to it.  Even if we doubled the square footage and looked at a 250ish square foot home, that would not be attractive.  We have active children and we spend a lot of time together at home.  It would not improve the quality of our lives to be so pressed for space.  I'm not going to make our kids give up all their toys.  And unlike Ms. Strobel and her husband, if someone in our family wants alone time, we cannot just venture out for a walk or bike ride by him or herself.  Our kids are too young for that.

Pointing out these differences are not a criticism of Ms. Strobel.  Not in the least.  Our family dynamics are different.  What works for one family may not work for another.  Ms. Strobel acknowledges that in her book.  Simplifying is not a one size fits all sort of thing.

Even though I'll likely never live the "radically simplified" life that Tammy Strobel writes about in her book, I found much that inspired me in her words. 

Many bits of inspiration were actually concepts that I'd read about in the past, but had lost sight of over time.  (I've had a particularly intense professional life the past few years and my kids have gotten older, which means their needs are more complex.)  In that sense, Ms. Strobel's book was a great reminder of past lessons I'd learned but forgotten to some extent.

But I also learned new things in her book,  On pp. 10-11, she writes about Tim Kasser's book The High Price of Materialism.  She sums up Professor Kasser's findings: "In short, materialism distracts us from two main facets in life that actually make us happy--strong relationships and doing work you love."  I loved that summary. 

Strong relationships and doing work you love.  That's what it is really all about, isn't it? 

For so long, I've spent most of my waking hours doing work for my paid gig.  Much of it had become drudgery and full of office politics.  It was draining.  There were aspects I liked very much.  But over time, it seemed like those became less and less a part of my job.    

Meanwhile, I feel like to some extent I've missed some of my kids' childhood.  Mommy was always so busy, so much to do for her paid job.  There are only so many hours in the day, and I didn't always have a lot of time to spend with my kids.  I'm anxious to not miss any more.

As I go through this journey, I'm going to try to return to this summary as my priorities.  Building strong relationships and doing work you love.